Austere Medicine

Dr. Christopher Tedeschi, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, and his colleagues at CUIMC worked with the CTL to develop a new one-month elective course for fourth-year medical students called “Austere Medicine”, as part of an Office of the Provost Innovative Course Design Grant. The course focuses on developing students’ resource management skills during wilderness, environmental, and disaster situations. The multifaceted project included two multimedia interactives, instructor lecture and how-to videos, Storyline modules and a rich CourseWorks instance. All the materials were designed to introduce and instruct students on how medicine is practiced in resource-limited settings.

While the course initially intended to rely heavily on in-person training, the team was forced to quickly adapt due to COVID-19 protocols. The team shifted to a hybrid model which included pre-work for students followed by virtual interactive discussion sessions to consolidate and synthesize ideas. The pre-work included interactive online modules in which students were presented with new concepts and scenarios (e.g., saving a drowning victim) interspersed with formative questions, allowing students to independently retrieve and consolidate new concepts. The course also implemented several small group activities, placing students in real-world situations in which they collaborated to develop implementation plans to address the challenges.

Lastly, CTL staff, in close collaboration with Dr. Tedeschi and his team, developed two virtual simulations: a medical kit simulation and a patient triage simulation. In the former, students practice packing their medical kit for various scenarios, such as on a mountain, in a desert, or on an unknown expedition. The patient triage scenario immerses medical students in the noisy, pressured environment of an emergency room, and instructs them to cope with the rapid inflow of patients, simulating the stress, anxiety, and resource limitation often faced in a real-life setting.